Talking head

A few aldermen take aim at mayoral mouthpiece Ernie Slottag

Communications Director Ernie Slottag: My job is to pass out and spread information about the city, make sure that people understand what were doing.

PHOTO BY GINNY LEE

Springfield is not a particularly large city
— the sixth-biggest, ranked by population, in Illinois. There
is one local television station and one daily newspaper. The mayor
earns nearly $105,000 a year, or nearly $1 for every man, woman and
child who lives within the city limits. Some members of the City Council are asking
why a city with these stats needs Ernie Slottag.Although he’s often called spokesman
for Mayor Tim Davlin, Slottag’s official job title is
communications director. When the mayor has something to say, he
typically lets Slottag do the talking. Last year, Slottag was
quoted well over 100 times in the State
Journal-Register on subjects ranging
from the mundane (e.g., the purchase of a desk, sofa, and other
office furniture for the city utility department, for instance) to
the critically important (the city’s record in hiring
minorities). Quotes from Slottag sometimes make good
head-scratchers. After more than a decade on the city payroll,
he’s as good as any politician at saying stuff that can
interpreted in any number of ways. He can also render inoperative
what has previously been said. Consider, for example, what he told
the daily newspaper in December when asked about the city’s
hiring practices in the police and fire departments: “The
mayor is proud of his hiring record. [Police Chief] Don Kliment,
the fire chief, they’re not recruiters, and they’ve
failed miserably, we’ve failed miserably, in trying to get
minorities into those . . . positions.” Then there was Slottag letting the world know
that the mayor took a drug test last month, just days after the SJ-R lit a
firestorm by reporting that an elected official, initially
unnamed, was somehow involved in a cocaine investigation (so far, no
politician has been arrested or charged). Slottag first insisted that Davlin’s
test was routine and part of a new random drug-testing program for
top city officials that had been in the works for some time.
“The coincidence is amazing,” he said. Three days
later, the communications director admitted that Davlin had
responded to pressure applied by a radio talk-show host,
who’d been asking when elected officials would submit to
tests: “It [the test] wasn’t random, but it was
impromptu. [The mayor] just thought to himself, ‘I’ll
just go and get tested and be done with it.’” In dozens of other cases, when the heat is
turned up, Slottag — not the mayor — is offered up for
public consumption. Take an Illinois State Police investigation of
city police detectives accused of misconduct. Two detectives have
been placed on administrative leave; investigators are trying to
determine whether they committed crimes. Slottag said that the
mayor knew about the investigation, and that’s about all
he’d say. “I don’t know what the
allegations are,” he said. Then he professed that he did know
something: “It’s really an internal issue, a personnel
issue.” But the investigation goes far beyond personnel
manuals — criminal cases have been dismissed because the
detectives in question provided false information in sworn
testimony. They once said that they’d found evidence against
a suspect in a curbside trash can that later proved fictitious: The
suspect did not have trash-collection service. And if it’s
just a personnel matter, why are the state police conducting the
investigation? “I can’t for the life of me think of
why he gets a paycheck from the city,” says Ald. Joe
Bartolomucci, who has proposed eliminating Slottag’s job.
“I have seen Mayor Davlin, time and time again, really out there
sinking under the weight of some discrepancies or miniature scandal, if
you will, and Ernie’s right there to throw him an anchor. What he
really is is the mayoral spokesman. About 80 percent of that is
political and really running interference for the mayor.” Slottag says he does a lot of stuff behind
the scenes that few folks notice, such as managing the city’s Web site, writing press
releases, and otherwise getting information to the public. “I
don’t do political stuff on government time,” he says.
“My job is to pass out and spread information about the city,
make sure that people understand what we’re doing.”Davlin has vowed to keep Slottag no matter
what. After Bartolomucci proposed eliminating money for
Slottag’s job from the budget, the mayor sent a memo to
council members warning that he’d cut two audiovisual
technicians from the city’s communication department before
putting Slottag on the street. That, the mayor asserted, would mean
deep cuts in communication services, including eliminating closed
captioning from televised City Council meetings so that the
hearing-impaired can keep track of city business. At least part of
the mayor’s threat seems idle, given that the Federal
Communications Commission requires closed captioning for televised
meetings. Nonetheless, Davlin held sway during
Tuesday’s council meeting, when the council voted 6-4 to keep
money for Slottag in the budget. He’ll earn $72,170 in the
next fiscal year, which starts March 1. Ald. Frank Kunz, who voted to keep the
funding, says he’d get rid of Slottag if he could but that
the city’s budget doesn’t work that way.
Slottag’s salary is lumped in with the overall budget of the
communication department, so the mayor can decide which employees
to keep and which to fire so long as he doesn’t exceed the
budget, Kunz says. “Unless a job position sits on a line
item by itself, we don’t have the power,” Kunz says.
“This is just a game. It’s a deal where some aldermen
feel that they can keep embarrassing the mayor.”